Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday August 29, 2010 @06:25PM
from the muy-bien-tal-vez dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking."

"Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality,"

Isn't passing a law that makes something originally outside the law to remain outside the law rather oxymoronic? It's like the US requiring members of sovereign nations that exist within its own borders prove to the US that they are valid members of said nation before the US will recognize them as such; such is the requirement for tribal membership for Native Americans. To pass such a law Chile only proves that it an make laws regarding net neutrality. If it can make them, it can remake them. If net neutrality were an objective fact, no country's laws would matter. Since they obviously do, even a 100% granting of neutrality by all concerned is no more than lip service. And being international, such a law would require a treaty. Check out for yourself how many treaties get signed by all involved, and how few of those actually get honored. TFA is the appropriate first step, but unless it's followed with some far more powerful and reaching reforms, say, putting worldwide network administration under a UN component with the power to actually act, it's strictly superficial regardless of intentions.

If this works out and their internet access appears to have been improved as a result, then I will support the concept of net neutrality. However, I doubt I will support and US implementation of it. I don't like the FCC. Anyone know anything about the regulatory commission that enforces net neutrality in Chile? Hopefully they are less political than our FCC.

I disagree, strongly. As one of the unlucky comcast customers who was caught up by their throttling for months, its very much a big deal to me. Especially when they kept insisting they weren't doing any of the kind of shit they eventually got caught doing, and to this day they still lie about the crap they were pulling. "Reasonable network management", my ass! Comcast claimed they weren't blocking anything, but when I had a torrent going (of ANYTHING) my downloads (on ANYTHING) dropped to almost nothing within 5 minutes, even at 3am! They throttled all traffic going to my computer because they saw one piece was something they didn't like (torrent traffic). The whole point of network neutrality is to keep them from pulling this kind of shit. They are welcome to throttle when I hit a certain amount of traffic for the month. They are NOT welcome to start throttling my fucking connection 5 minutes into a LEGAL BSD ISO download and turn the torrent, as well as the rest of my connection to crap to save themselves a few pennies on data transit costs. That is bullshit. Pure bullshit.

I can not wait for the US to implement mandatory network neutrality. And I'm not talking about Google+Verizon's underhanded back door deals that let them only do it where its favorable to them. It's either that, or force comcast, the bells, and any other company that's ever been given tax breaks and subsidized land from the city for their equipment and for their lines to force them to provide wholesale access to their wires to other isps. That way, consumers really do have a choice on who they can get internet from and whether they are going to put up with this kind of crap or not.

If the traffic doesn't originate in Chile then it is subject to arbitrary and/or discriminatory blocking or throttling before it gets to Chile.

You would pretty much expect that your packets are at the mercy of whomever is routing them anyway so this is no big deal. At least they are taking a step in the right direction. In this country (USA) that'll never happen because there's either too much consumer apathy or excessive control by those who have the most to lose. Sad but true.

Um...I agree with you that lack of competition probably has a lot to do with it...but they don't just throw a datacenter at some random place. One of the key things they would look for is cheap bandwidth. Plus, when you're moving huge quantities of data, it's easier to get a good deal. It's like anything else.

I once had a girlfriend whose mother was a regional manager for a restaurant chain. She got hundreds of dollars of free food every month. Does that mean that, if there was more competition in the restaurant industry, we could all get hundreds of dollars of free food? No. When you have certain locations and deals and jobs, you get things cheaper. So to say that bandwidth to your home should be cheap because bandwidth to a datacenter is cheap is a pretty poor argument.

So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked

Yes. Just like they were before.

And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...

No shorter (if ever) than before the law.

Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.

Certainly not by any sane legal definition.

Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.

...which has what to do with Net Neutrality?

All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?

What if an ISP started throttling/blocking something a little less beloved than torrents? How much support would you get if they blocked, say, terrorist propaganda? Every one of the slippery slope arguments applied to government (not that I've heard a convincing one yet) can be applied to companies.

"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.

So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked?

Well, what do you think? Were illegal services all fine and dandy beforehand? Use your brain.

And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...

OK, so throw out the baby with the bathwater. Also, that's pretty off-topic.

Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.

Huh? Are employees consumers?

Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.

This isn't the great firewall of China, in fact it's quite the opposite but "government bad! government will make you sorry!" is not a compelling argument.

All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?

Comcast won in the end in case you forgot here's a link [businessweek.com], and they were resetting traffic with RST packets. If you dont think that was a test of what they could get away with, you're crazy. It was precedent setting.

"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.

I'm sorry this is going to sound rude but.... your post was either a complete troll or one of the stupidest things I have read on Slashdot in a long time. You warn of fixing a problem that doesn't exist and try proving your point with a bunch of unrelated "what-if" scenarios peppered with existential "you'll be sorry" fear mongering.

The standard QoS bits are basically useless across any administrative boundary (such as the connection between you and your ISP, or your ISP and their upstreams/peers). Otherwise, you very quickly get people realizing they can just set all of their traffic to the "high priority" class. The only way an ISP could reasonably do QoS is by port or packet inspection.

Yeah that's a great idea, put enforcing network administration of the Internet under the UN, then they can set up a commission to oversee it. I figure the Chairperson of that committee will be from Iran or China, countries known far and wide for their dedication to open and free exchange of knowledge.

Bandwidth for the ISP should be even cheaper for the ISP than what the OP pays for it. Where do you think your home connection ends up going to? A large datacenter run by your ISP that is located strategically to allow for the ISP to reap cheap bandwidth. On top of that, they possibly don't even pay for much bandwidth at all & instead setup peering agreements with backbone providers. Yet broadband prices keep going up. The last mile is not cheap to maintain, but a lot of the intiail costs have already been recouped as far as setting up initial infrastructure & the ISPs are very slow at upgrading or even maintaining their network.

Prices keep going up because there is no reasonable competition. Usually it's either cable for $X or DSL, that after you are forced into getting a POTS line put in and then their addt'l fees is just as much yet half the speed.

The government must restrict monopolies. Without a government, the monopoly holders would find some other way to stop upstarts besides putting pressure on the local offices. A truly free market will devolve into a pit of snakes very fast, taking in both those who have and those who have not.

when I had a torrent going (of ANYTHING) my downloads (on ANYTHING) dropped to almost nothing within 5 minutes, even at 3am!

I can almost certainly guarantee that within four years of a network neutrality regulation being passed that at 3am your torrents would not slow - they would stop, at any time, because your ISP will be required by the FCC to not pass BitTorrent traffic from RIAA blacklisted sites.

Do not give them the very foothold they can use to get in your door.

I am a Comcast customer too. I had the same issues as you. And having had a taste of it in no way do I want that kind of thing permanent across all ISP's.

I can not wait for the US to implement mandatory network neutrality.

I almost year for you all to get just what you are asking for, so I can laugh and laugh and laugh. But as I said, I too enjoy the use of BitTorrent and I think I would be more sad to lose that than to be proven so completely how right I was...

Well Mr Anon Coward, or AC for short, the problem we have seen again and again with the whole libertarian "let the market take care of it" philosophy is this- without regulation one or two players will simply use their wealth to crush everyone else and then destory any free market that once existed there. If you would like examples I suggest you look into how Intel was able to force the higher electric and heating bills of Netburst onto the public by bribes to OEMs and thus removing free choice, or for an oldie but a goodie how MSFT crushed competition by tying windows to computers sold and not computers installed with Windows.

When we are talking about things with huge startup costs as barriers to entry, such as CPU fabs or in this case millions of miles of cable or fiber, it really doesn't take much for the biggest player to simply wipe out any competition and lock the market up for themselves. Thanks to the massive deregulation that has happened in this country we have gone from the tons of little players we had under dialup to a few massive regional monopolies, that can simply use predatory pricing to crush anyone that dares to enter a market or simply refuse to allow them access to the backbones (which they own).

In my own area I have watched three different smaller ISPs be crushed by getting screwed out of backbone access, and talking to one shortly before it went under their lawyer made it clear that while there was a good chance they could win, it would cost them in excess of 10 million in lawyers fees and a decade of litigation to find out. THAT my dear AC is how come we need the government to open up broadband to competition. Because as it is now you will simply be destroyed by the local incumbents if you try to compete. Sadly instead we will most likely see guys like you demanded even more deregulation and we will fall farther and farther behind as ISP impose caps rather than upgrade infrastructure, because they know their "customers" simply have nowhere else to go.

Does that really matter. A slow down of foreign content will simply drive the production of local content. Plus network neutrality is all about open politics, maintaining an equally accessible public discourse, about gutting the ability of mass media to dominate public consciousness. That needs to work on a national level before you push it on an international level.